AqBanking

Aquamaniacs Banking is the successor of openhbci, a module which supported the open german online banking standardhome banking common interface, which since 2003 is called FinTS. In between EBICS and OFX Direct Connect are also supported.

Compatibility

GnuCash compiles with all available versions of AqBanking. There used to be some version restrictions, but since gnucash 2.2.7 all versions are supported, as noted on AqBanking3_Porting.

HBCI Security Media

HBCI/AqBanking can use the following security Media

PIN/TAN: supported on all OS

self-generated keyfile: supported on all OS

Chipcards: Supported on Linux, but Chipcards are not supported on Windows. (They are supported on Windows by the latest libchipcard version 4 with gwenhywfar version 3, but gnucash does not compile with those versions yet.)

Setting up a HBCI PIN/TAN account

By Commandline

This instructions will explain how to set up a HBCI account with PIN/TAN authentification. The access data is from a test account that can be used by any gnucash developer; the instructions are also in src/import-export/hbci/HACKING-HBCITEST.txt.

We assume you have aqbanking and gnucash installed, and aqbanking's program aqhbci-tool is in your PATH.

Attention developers: If you call these programs and/or gnucash from the MSYS command line, you must change your HOME env variable to be the value of the USERPROFILE variable. This is because MSYS sets a new HOME that isn't know to any other (normal) windows program that is started outside MSYS. In particular, if you start gnucash outside of msys, it will look for the configuration and also for aqbanking's configuration in $USERPROFILE, but in msys, it will look in HOME. So you always have to gnucash as HOME="$USERPROFILE" gnucash

Create/register a new security medium in AqBanking

aqhbci-tool addmedium -t pintan

Find out the index number of the newly created security medium

aqhbci-tool listmedia

The output will be something like

Medium 0: "PINTAN-20070216-214030" (pintan)

and the important part is the first number, here: 0.

Create a HBCI user

aqhbci-tool adduser -m N -s SERVERURL -b BANKCODE -u USERID

where N is the medium number (0), SERVERURL is the full URL of the server application, BANKCODE is the bank code, and USERID is the identification string of the user that is allowed to access this account. For the test account, we have the following:

There is an optional argument of the CUSTOMERID, but this concerns you only if your bank explicitly said you have to use some extra customer id that is different from the user id.

Retrieve a system identification number

This system identification is necessary for the HBCI protocol to identify you and your software; if this step is forgotten or fails, nothing else will work.

aqhbci-tool getsysid -b BANKCODE

This command will ask you several questions. First it retrieves the server certificate and asks you whether you accept it. Then it asks whether you want to accept the certificate only this session or forever. Eventually, you have to enter the PIN number (password) of your online banking account. (For the gnucash test account, this is 12345.) The full output looks e.g. like this:

Any additional (error) messages can be ignored for now; just continue to work.

List the resulting accounts

aqhbci-tool listaccounts

The bank server should have sent a list of accounts in the last step already. If this is the case, you can view the list of accessible accounts now. The output for the gnucash test should look like this:

Match the HBCI accounts in gnucash

In order to access the accounts from gnucash, you need to match a HBCI account to one of your gnucash accounts each. The next time you start gnucash, press "Tools -> Online Banking Setup" to use the online banking setup wizard. Press "Next" there. Ignore the text that says you should start the external program "AqBanking setup wizard", because you've already set up aqbanking by the command line. Because of this, press "Next" again.

You will now arrive at the "Match HBCI accounts with GnuCash accounts" window. You should see the three accounts mentioned above in the left column of the wizard window.

Click on an account name on the left (the account defined in the AqBanking setup wizard configuration), and select the GnuCash account that should be associated with it.

Using the test account

As mentioned above, the gnucash developers can use a test account to test some of the aqbanking/HBCI features. Here's a step-by-step instruction of what you can do:

Setup the accounts as described above.

In gnucash, match one of your gnucash accounts with the first test account (bank code 80007777, account number 2501111538); press "Next" and "Finish" in the wizard.

Testing "Get Balance"

Open the gnucash register of the account that you've matched with hbci above

Press "Actions -> Online actions -> Get balance"

When asked for the password/PIN, enter 12345

If things run successfully, you are being told a balance and asked whether you want to reconcile your account. The balance value changes by the other test users anyway, so you don't have to care about the actual balance.

Testing "Get Transactions"

Open the gnucash register of the account that you've matched with hbci above

Press "Actions -> Online actions -> Get transactions"

When asked for the date, enter "From: 2007-02-15", but the To-date can be left at "now".

When asked for the password/PIN, enter 12345

If things run successfully, you see the "transaction matcher window" with the downloaded transactions. You can select "New" for all of them. At subsequent downloads, those transactions that are downloaded again should automatically be marked as "Reconcile" instead.

Testing "Issue Transaction"

Open the gnucash register of the account that you've matched with hbci above

Press "Actions -> Online actions -> Issue transaction"

Enter the following values:

Recipient account number 2501111539 , recipient bank code 80007777

All other fields can contain whatever values you like; if they are not allowed to be empty, you will be told so when clicking "Ok".

Click "Ok". Now select a destination account in gnucash, then click "Ok".

When asked for the password/PIN, enter 12345

When asked for a TAN and specifically for TAN number 1 (or another number of 2 through 9), enter 11111111 (or 22222222...), i.e. exactly eight times the number in the question.

It seems like the test account does not give out any TANs anymore. The server asks for TAN number 'no_more_free_user_tans'.

If things run successfully, you only see the transaction in the gnucash register now. If the transmission didn't work, the transaction in the register should have been deleted again. If things worked ok, your next statement download should download that transaction that you've just sent to the bank, and the next balance download should have changed by that amount as well.

Debugging

If there are any problems during the HBCI or OFX connection, here are further options for debugging:

Keep in mind that there are many many many different bank servers on this world, and every one of them might behave slightly differently. Hence, if you report a bug, please also state which bank server you are using (IP address and bank name).

To see much more log messages of aqbanking, you can set several environment variables either before starting gnucash or in the shell script gnucash or gnucash.bat. For example, in a Unix shell you would type

However, these log messages are all sent to stdout or stderr, which on Windows by default isn't available. To make these available on Windows, you need to change the exetype of gnucash-bin.exe from "Windows" to "Console", see Windows#Console output and exetype.

From the german mailing list in 2011:
AqBanking stores log files for HBCI in ~/.aqbanking/backends/aqhbci/data/banks/<country code>/<Bank ID>/logs/*

Known Issues

from 2.1.1 until before 2.2.5: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439654 AqBanking on Windows cannot download balance/transactions via HBCI - there is a "Unable to send (network error)" instead. The bugreport contains a patch for the gwenhywfar DLL which must be recompiled. If someone confirms that this patch fixes the problem, the patch will be included in a new gwenhywfar release, but currently the gwenhywfar maintainers are waiting for such feedback.